All My Mother's Lovers

Product Information

As Maggie sets Her essays, reviews, and other writings have been featured in the New York Times, Vogue, and Elle among others. there is so much depth and so many layers to these characters, and that’s what keeps the story going.

A story of good but difficult characters and the openhearted people who love them, All My Mother’s Lovers is a compassionate and insightful work. Maggie starts out as an immature and confused young woman who despite believing that she has a strong grip on life, has not accepted herself and blames her mother for her own issues. As we go through the story, we watch Maggie evolve from an angsty somewhat immature twenty something to someone who begins to understand the complexity of relationships as she learns about her mother as a person versus her mother as a parent.Instead, she hits the road to hand-deliver these mysterious letters and learn more about her mother in the process. When Maggie's mother Iris dies in a car accident, she leaves a small pile of letters addressed to men Maggie has never heard of. It was incredibly insightful; if you’re looking for a fictional read that diversifies your ideas of LGBTQ+ life I recommend this book. This story tackles a myriad of issues such as racism, prejudice, privilege, biases, sexuality, gender, etc. Lovers” can feel thin at times, though it’s a testament to Masad’s writing that I wanted more from the world she created: more depth to Iris’s letters, which read more like camp-pen-pal correspondence than confessions from the grave; and more dimension to Maggie’s dad, Peter, who spends most of the novel out of sorts, only to drop a bombshell at the end that feels pat and underexplored.

It is a reality that jolts Maggie right out of the life she has crafted for herself as a late-20s, queer woman, living in St. Maggie's quest is packed with surprises and wise insights about human relationships, accepting each other, and being queer.With a character so woke, it feels oddly surprising when the plot falls into formulaic pits, most notably exemplified in a trip to an omniscient psychic who could easily exist on the Disney Channel. this is a real quote):"He had radical politics, and while she challenged him occasionally on them, she never won an argument. When your character thinks they are in one movie after another - it should be a red flag): "The carpet felt like a pillow under her soles. I found myself thinking about growing older in new ways, but more importantly living a full life as I age. She buries her feelings in pot and booze, is incredibly rude to her younger brother (they’re both adults), dismissive of her mother, and pandering to her father.

This book was most interesting in the places where Masad sought to untangle the complexities of identity/attraction/how people bring themselves to their relationships, which I think, in theory, should’ve been present throughout, but instead shone through primarily in Iris’s and Peter’s narratives. They hadn’t been particularly close in years, as Maggie felt Iris never accepted her sexuality, always seeming to insinuate it was some sort of phase. Yet Masad is deft and incisive about the sometimes-fraught nature of mother-daughter relationships, around which loaded subtext can seem to twist and twine like Christmas lights.

This book overwhelmingly provided value to me as a reading/listening experience and I can't wait for Ms.

I'm a liberal Obama loving old millennial/young Gen X-er, and I can affirm we are not a monolith that thinks with a hive mind. This is nothing like Evelyn Hugo and if you are considering picking this book up because you enjoyed that book, don't. i didn’t really understand the point of the book at first, it went really slowly and i liked it but didn’t love it.The characters acknowledge their awareness of major news events, really events that are a crisis for those living them. Still, Maggie’s grief is palpable, and she has trouble navigating her father and brother’s feelings as well.